Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, took it to the purveyor of hate and former Republican VP candiate, Sarah Palin, this week in Alaska:
In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. "Don’t retreat...reload" may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She’s using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She’s on the wrong side of the line there. She’s getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We’ve got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health care votes.
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She’ll go down in history like McCarthy. Palinism will become an ugly word.
AFL-CIO Blog: Trumka Takes It to Palin in Her Back Yard
Thank you, Mr. Trumka. Many of the people like Palin or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh are purveyers of hatred that is Un-American. When we treat them with respect, as if they are a legitimate part of discourse in this nation, we legitimize hatred.
More from Mr. Trumka, after the fold.
More about Palin from his speech to the Alaska AFL-CIO:
Who is she, anyway? Sarah Palin?
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I bet most of you, on a clear day, can see her hypocrisy from your house.
I think Sarah Palin quit so she wouldn't have to be accountable, so she wouldn't have a record that could be scrutinized.
Instead, she's hanging out on cable TV, almost a parody of herself, coming out with conspiracy theories about Obama and his "death panels." Talking about "the real America." Talking about building schools in "our neighboring country of Afghanistan." Writing speech notes to herself on her hands.
Sometimes – about Sarah Palin – you just have to laugh. But it's not really funny. In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. "Don't retreat... reload" may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She's using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She's on the wrong side of the line there. She's getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We've got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health care votes.
And down in Tyler, Texas, she's talking about -- and I quote -- "union thugs." What? Her husband's a union man. Is she calling him a thug? Sarah Palin ought to know what union men and women are.
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But using the term "union thug." That's poisonous. There's history behind that rhetoric. That's how bosses and politicians in decades past justified the terrorizing of workers, the murdering of organizers.
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Quite frankly, America works because lots of people contribute lots of ideas—that's good—even when some of them are just plain wrong. But people need to come to the table in good faith. That's not Sarah Palin. She'll go down in history like McCarthy. Palinism will become an ugly word.
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I can tell you one thing: here's no question about who we are. We're right here. We're everywhere. We're working people standing together to rebuild America's middle class. You don't get there with a cable career, or with the Party of No.
We've got a one-word plan called Jobs!
But we're not going to get our jobs unless we get the right people in Juneau and the right people in Washington.
Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, Alaska AFL-CIO Biennial Convention, Anchorage, Alaska, August 26, 2010
He did not just talk about Palin. Trumka also talked about the Obama adminstration and its record, and why we have not seen more jobs so far:
I want to talk for a minute about the Obama administration: Without the Obama recovery plan, we'd be in a full-blown depression.
The Obama administration has already created more jobs — even in this weak recovery — than were created during the entire 8 years of George W. Bush.
Many of our members across the country are working today on bridges, highways and other projects funded by recovery dollars. Let's not forget the jobs in clean energy and school construction, and Obama's executive action to reverse the Bush ban on PLAs, and to prohibit federal contractors from using funds to block union organizing.
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That's a record, a real foundation. It's something to build on. But it's not enough. It's nowhere near enough.
To be frank with you, a lot of us anticipated that Congress would have moved faster. That maybe, by now, we would have seen some serious job growth, major investments to rebuild our crumbling education system, our transportation infrastructure, our rail systems. These are the essential investments we've called for to rebuild America.
But let's be clear about why we haven't seen more. Most of what we see is Republicans fighting Democrats, and sometimes they're joined by a few Democrats, and we're living the fall-out.
Here's the problem. Every time the Democrats and President Obama have proposed jobs legislation, they've been blocked by crass maneuvers from the most politically motivated Republican minority we have ever seen – and I really do mean ever.
Remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard L. Trumka, Alaska AFL-CIO Biennial Convention, Anchorage, Alaska, August 26, 2010
He's right about Palin. In my view, he's also right about the Obama adminstration and the Dems who support working people:
But let's be clear about why we haven't seen more. Most of what we see is Republicans fighting Democrats, and sometimes they're joined by a few Democrats, and we're living the fall-out.
Here's the problem. Every time the Democrats and President Obama have proposed jobs legislation, they've been blocked by crass maneuvers from the most politically motivated Republican minority we have ever seen – and I really do mean ever.
No doubt this adminstration has made some mistakes. In my view, the stimulus was too low. But they are the only hope we have now in 2010, the only bulwark between extremist anti-worker philosophies, really anti-American philosophies, of people like Sarah Palin and the many tea party candidates.
I'm glad we have Trumka standing up for the working woman and man in this nation.
Union Maid (Woody Guthrie and Mill Lampell)
In May, 1940, Woody Guthrie travelled with Pete Seeger to Oklahoma, where they met up with local Communist Party organisers, Bob and Ina Wood. Ina, a militant feminist, complained that Pete and Woody never sang songs about women in the labour movement. So Woody immediately sat down to write Union Maid to the tune of Red Wing (by Kerry Mills, 1907).
Pete Seeger thought only two of the verses were any good and a year later told Mill Lampell, fellow member of The Almanac Singers, that he had forgotten the others. Lampell went into another room and came back later with the third verse, which they then recorded.
It soon became one of Woody Guthrie's most popular songs. The line about joining the Ladies' Auxiliary, which was not actually written by Woody, is now often sung as "And fight together for liberty."
Barack Obama: I Believe In Unions
Barack Obama talking about why he believes in unions and what unions have meant for every day working people in this country.